Edelman International

The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes.

It’s an all too common adage and one that applies to comms agencies and their own marketing. When the opportunity to revamp Edelman’s international presence presented itself we took the opportunity to put into practice everything we’d learnt about deploying large websites.

First point of call was interrogating the available data on the current site to get an understanding of what content was working and what wasn’t. We then did a competitor audit to understand the wider environment.

With this information we developed a greatly simplified site architecture that surfaced the content that visitors wanted to see and, where possible, removed what was unloved. Getting board approval on this wasn’t easy but with the data to back us up and the fact that this approach would halve our time to live due to the reduced work required we were able to get approval. Next step was to create an exhaustive list of content types, this list would inform our module based design approach. A naming convention was decided upon and we began wireframing key user flows with module based pages. This modular approach ensures design consistency across the site and means we can quickly build out unique page structures for different requirements.

The site has only two page templates, index and content, however these templates can be populated with a large variety of modules for specific purposes. The modules are of course responsive, adjusting to best display the required content according to device and screen real estate.

With our structure in place we began the visual design process, taking cues from some of the existing Edelman sites but introducing new elements that befitted a global corporate web experience rather than local offices.

To best represent the concept, a prototype was created in response to the brief: ‘a modern, fast web experience that represents today’s Edelman’ and this was used to get buy in from the stakeholders.

The modular approach, documentation in Confluence, established naming convention and prototyping process meant hand over to the dev team was almost seamless.

The site is built with a Drupal back end and React front end allowing for an app like experience that eliminates traditional page loads.